Henry Giroux Quotes

As more government functions are privatized, we find political leaders defunding the public school system, shifting government funds to the private, for-profit school industry.

I am a very instinctive Conservative. I have created a welfare system where it pays to work. I have created independent schools within the state sector bringing excellence to children wherever they are.

Public education is so important - resisting privatization and charterization, high-stakes testing, and defunding. It's important for New York, but it's also important for the country.

With the corporatization and privatization of higher education, it is increasingly more difficult for colleges and universities to expand and deepen democratic public life, produce engaged critical citizens, and operate as democratic public spheres.

Rick Santorum has come out against contraception and against college. He wants us literally to be f**king stupid.

The current siege on higher education, whether through defunding education, eliminating tenure, tying research to military needs, or imposing business models of efficiency and accountability, poses a dire threat not only to faculty and students who carry the mantle of university self-governance, but also to democracy itself.

The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all reactionary all backward — there-is-no-global-warming — rube reality. Actual conservatives, let alone the educated classes, have long since fled.

Every person in this country who has the desire and ability should be able to get all the education they need regardless of the income of their family. This is not a radical idea. In Germany, Scandinavia and many other countries, higher education is either free or very inexpensive. We must do the same.

It started with Ronald Reagan, when he took away the financing to the California universities. It used to be cheap to send your kids to the UCs. They'd call it an investment, because the more you educate people, the more they'll pay in taxes, because they'll get better jobs. But Reagan said, "No, it's a cost, so you're going to have to pay the cost." So now people can't afford to get an education. Anyway, I don't want to get too political, but yeah, I think the spirit of this country is finally coming back, and hopefully it will triumph.

Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.

Hillary Clinton has a $350 billion plan that she says will make college more affordable. Which has to be better than my parents' plan to make college affordable: 'Be good at sports.'

Increasing access to federal student loans has been a bipartisan effort in Washington, one that I have supported. But it has created what many experts believe is a bubble in higher education, not unlike the housing bubble that preceded the financial crisis.

In the current environment, attributing low student performance to teacher tenure is one of the great unproven causal links out there. The relationship just hasn't been examined very carefully, but we should all recognize that in higher education the strongest institutions generally have the most robust tenure systems, and in elementary and secondary, the states with the strongest teacher unions (and tenure systems) tend to have the highest student performance.

The conservative goal has been the Third Worldization of the United States: an increasingly underemployed, lower-wage work-force; a small but growing moneyed class that pays almost no taxes; the privatization or elimination of human services; the elimination of public education for low-income people; the easing of restrictions against child labor; the exporting of industries and jobs to low-wage, free-trade countries; the breaking of labor unions; and the elimination of occupational safety and environmental controls and regulations.

The laboring classes constitute the main part of our population. They should be protected in their efforts peaceably to assert their rights when endangered by aggregated capital and all statutes on this subject should recognize the care of the State for honest toil and be framed with a view of improving the condition of the workingman

I think we should see whether we are wise trying to educate everybody to a high standard the way we are trying to do now. There has to be a high level of education so everybody is literate, but whether university education is necessary for everyone is open to question.

When the mass of families in a State are without property, then those who were once citizens become virtually slaves. The more the State steps in to enforce conditions of security and sufficiency; the more it regulates wages, provides compulsory insurance, doctoring, education, and in general takes over the lives of the wage-earners, for the benefit of the companies and men employing the wage-earners, the more is this condition of semi-slavery accentuated.

I've been a witness to unfairness in society all my life. To the conditions under which my mother worked all her life, working in an industrial weaving shed in the north of England. And it has been this feature of unfairness that has motivated me in all of my political thinking.

Mr. Chamberlain loves the working man, he loves to see him work.

So I shamelessly say, no, I want him [Obama] to fail, if his agenda is a far- left collectivism, some people say socialism, as a conservative heartfelt, deeply, why would I want socialism to succeed?

I'm not going to let the government make a profit out of lending money for people to go to college. So we're going to really change this. I see it as an investment, not an expense, and I'm going to treat it that way.

Formerly when a man worked ten hours a day, it was called economic slavery; nowadays it is called moonlighting.

If the Government gets into business on any large scale, we soon find that the beneficiaries attempt to play a large part in the control. While in theory it is to serve the public, in practice it will be very largely serving private interests. It comes to be regarded as a species of government favor and those who are the most adroit get the larger part of it.

What the working man sells is not directly his Labor, but his Laboring Power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. This is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Law, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his laboring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer.

Making college affordable is a really important goal, and my plan will work better than Senator [Bernie] Sanders' plan by everybody who has looked at it.